Today, many (if not all) organizations tend to conduct substantial amounts of business electronically, and consequently, depend on having reliable, continuous access to information technology systems, applications, and resources in order to effectively manage business endeavors. At the same time, information technology threats ranging from viruses, “malware,” and data corruption to application failures and natural disasters are growing in number, type, and severity, while current trends in technology have presented information technology departments with a plethora of recurring challenges. For example, the need to do business at an increasingly faster pace with larger critical data volumes have amplified the pressure on information technology, which has led to efforts that relate to consolidating, migrating, or virtualizing servers and resources hosted thereon without disrupting operations or damaging resources. As such, even isolated failures have the potential to render information technology resources unavailable, which may cause organizations to lose substantial amounts of revenue or information that could impede or even cripple business.
Moreover, the current trends within the information technology community often exacerbate problems that result from data corruption, failures, and other threats interfering with resource availability. For example, a few years ago, losing connectivity to an e-mail server may have been nothing more than a nuisance to many organizations, but today the same issue could potentially result in tremendous productivity losses, customer dissatisfaction, and poor public image. Thus, the dynamic nature associated with information technology environments makes critical that system testing and personnel training occur on a regular basis and at proper levels, especially due to ongoing needs that relate to replacing hardware, upgrading software, dealing with personnel coming and going, and other inevitable changes. Additionally, many government regulations on information availability and security require that crucial data needed to certify compliance with reporting requirements be archived for subsequent retrieval. For example, healthcare organizations must demonstrate compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements, public companies and organizations in the accounting industry must demonstrate compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, and financial institutions must demonstrate compliance with Graham-Leach-Bliley requirements. Further, even if an organization does not have to meet certain standards to comply with legal requirements, serious risks may arise unless business continuity and disaster recovery are elevated to a strategic level.
However, although these and other concerns can substantially impact performance and governance, risk, and compliance concerns associated with disaster recovery systems, existing techniques that seek to address such problems tend to fall short in suitably carrying out tests that less disruptive, more proactive, and more frequent than reactive, live tests. As a result, the existing techniques often fail to adequately detect problems early and avoid expensive costs and downtime associated with fixing such problems. For example, one existing technique to address availability, reliability, and integrity associated with information technology environments includes real-time data replication, whereby multiple copies of a data source may be maintained at multiple locations in order to have an up-to-date copy immediately available should the primary copy be lost. However, real-time data replication has various weaknesses, including that if data has been damaged or corrupted at a source site, the corruption will most likely be immediately replicated to the target or standby site. In particular, corruption leads to data becoming unusable, wherein human error, application flaws, viruses, or other issues may cause the data corruption. As such, existing techniques that perform real-time data replication typically cannot determine that a specific piece of information has been rendered unusable because the system is simply carrying out the assigned task to ensure that the target or standby site constantly represents an up-to-date replica of the data at the source site. Consequently, if data corruption that cannot be addressed with real-time replication alone, data protection gaps may arise, especially because traditional approaches typically restore information from the last backup or snapshot, which may potentially cause stale information to be restored.
Furthermore, certain applications and data often do not require real-time replication or failover capabilities, whereby tape and disk backup systems are still critical to overall business continuity plans. However, less experienced staff frequently manage backup hardware and physical media at remote or branch offices, and in many cases, remote or branch offices are run without any support information technology staff. For these and other reasons, remote or branch offices tend to fly under the radar when monitoring backup success, testing recovery procedures, and following security and maintenance protocols, which can lead to failure-prone recovery processes and unnecessary administrative overhead in the remote or branch offices. Accordingly, the various factors and problems discussed above translate into an ever-important need to protect businesses and other organizations that rely upon information technology against potential disruption to personnel operations, physical operations, and lost access to information technology resources. Moreover, in cases where disruption does occur, existing systems tend to fall short in adequately restoring information technology resources to a current and healthy state as rapidly as possible.